I’m heading to Austin, TX this week for SXSW and this time I’m speaking on a panel. Come check out Suxorz ‘09: The Ten Worst Social Media Campaigns on Saturday, March 14th at 5:00 PM. Last year, this panel was one of the most lively and interactive of the whole festival and I’m honored to be sitting on the panel with Zadi Diaz from Epic Fu, Jeff Jarvis from Buzz Machine, and Sarah Smith from Wonkette. Moderator Henry Copeland of BlogAds promises to throw firecrackers into the social media bonfire and keep things lively.

And don’t forget about Campfire Creative Director Brian Cain’s panel,You’re Living in Your Own Private Branded Entertainment Experience, which I promise will be the most unusual panel you’ll see at SXSW.

I’m looking forward to meeting people and eating BBQ so if you are going and want to connect, drop me a note mmonello (at) campfirenyc (dot) com or contact me through my Twitter account. Hope to see you there.

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I’ve been to several PSFK events and I always get a great deal of inspiration and information out of them, so I want to point you towards the PSFK New York conference, taking place on April 2. This year has a great lineup of speakers already booked, including the fantastic Wooster Collective, a representative from Boxee, and Danielle Sacks, our favorite Fast Company writer. Unfortunately, I’m out of town and won’t be able to attend so how about you go and tell me what I missed?

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Randall Rothenberg, the CEO of the IAB, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, gave an impassioned speech last week at the IAB’s annual convention in Orlando, calling on his member media companies and interactive publishers to foster a “creative renaissance in interactive advertising.” He said his members had been “Toiling under the tyranny of the click for too long,” which he attributed to their direct response heritage.

Rothenberg also announced the formation of an Agency Advisory Board which includes Campfire and other creative boutiques like AKQA, Droga 5 and the Barbarian Group. In addition a number of larger creative shops like Crispin and three media companies are part of the effort.

Attending the convention I was impressed that the guys caught in the middle of the digital revolution, the on-line portals like Google and Yahoo and big on-line media buyers, were spending three days talking about creativity. Especially during a severe recession.

One of the high points was a stemwinder of a speech by Wenda Harris Millard, IAB Chair and the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

A few excerpts from Forbes’ report on Millard’s speech:

“‘When I was at Yahoo, one of the people on the tech side called display advertising, ‘non-performing advertising.’”

“…if the industry leaves marketing to “price-setting media agencies and price-cutting marketers, we will kill this business.“ The solution is to help marketers get out of the way of the conversation among consumers and get them into it.”

“’Stop acting like we’re selling schmattes, and more like the makers of magic that we are.’”

Finally, two essential reads, both by Randall Rothenberg: his post, “The Interactive Revolution is Here!” And Randall’s fabulous book, “Where the Suckers Moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign” about Wieden winning, and then spectacularly losing, the Subaru account 20 years ago.

Technorati Tags: Campfire, Conferences, puppy, Wenda Harris Millard

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Ford has an excellent interactive campaign up and running for the 2010 Fiesta — called the “Fiesta Movement”. Ford is asking “Millennials” to submit videos pitching themselves as tester/bloggers for the new Fiesta (which won’t launch for a year). They’ll give the winning entrants a Fiesta for six months, asking them to post videos to all their social media platforms and to Ford’s Fiesta Movement microsite.

What’s great is Ford is reaching out to influentials among their target looking for feedback — although it’s not clear how much they can alter the design of the car before releasing it in a year. Car companies, particularly American ones, are notoriously slow to institute design changes.

Mediapost talked to Sam De La Garza (”SDLG”), Ford’s small car marketing manager, and Scott Monty (”SM”), manager of digital and multimedia communications, about how they were picking winners. Their answers reflect significant social media culture consciousness:

“Q: How do you decide on who these 100 “agents” are who get the Fiesta for six months?

“SM: Part of it is their demonstrated enthusiasm for and interest in the program, to see if they are into the whole thing. Second is demonstrating that they have an online audience they can share it with. They may be regular folks who have blogs, would-be journalists or part-time auto bloggers.

“SDLG: I think as we see the caliber of people [applying], we have changed our ideas a bit on the fly. Our original thoughts were around trying to use filters and criteria like: “Do you have over 500 friends on Facebook?,” “Do you have over 1,000 followers on Twitter or 250,000 subscribers on YouTube?” But these are basic thresholds; the next step is seeing what type of “pull” they get from their application videos on YouTube, which shows they can be a valuable agent for us.”

So Ford is trying to develop new ways of interacting with their audience, the lack of which in my opinion (IMHO), was one of the contributing factors to Detroit getting it so wrong over the past number of years. Ever since the destruction of Detroit as a city, designers and marketers for the big American auto companies have worked out of distant suburban industrial parks without any real consumer connection or audience feedback.

In a geographical sense white flight killed designer’s interactions and instincts. This new campaign is another way to reconnect with their target and with America.

Technorati Tags: advertising, Facebook, Ford, marketing, Mediapost, Social Media, Twitter

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MyHome2.0, Campfire and Verizon’s makeover show for FiOS got some some more attention this week, first via Adweek and the Buzz Awards.

See the whole article here.

And Adweek also published a piece by Beth Mulhern, one of the key Verizon executives, on the MyHome2.0 project:

See the whole article here

Technorati Tags: Adweek, Award Shows, FiOS, Mulhern, MyHome2.0, social media, Verizon

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Creativity Magazine has a lengthy story on our True Blood campaign for HBO, focusing on the storytelling aspects:

Expanding the universe of an existing property, whether a film or TV show, further through deeper stories involving marginal characters is not a new type of storytelling, witness the cottage industry of Star Wars and Star Trek literature. But True Blood’s is an exceptional case in that the peripheral mythology has been written by an agency. The success of Campfire’s latest creation is obviously based on the storytelling prowess of Cain and Hale, along with the agency’s respect for the overall artistic integrity of the show.

Check it out here!

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I love baseball. It’s the perfect blend of nuance and number-crunching. GDIP, WHIP and BABIP. Deep flies to left field to score a runner from third, long leads off first that draw a throw from the catcher.

And then I catch the Home Run Derby last night. All sizzle and no steak, the marketing equivalent of a :30 spot in the Super Bowl. Sure, it’s fun to laugh at anthropomorphic animals, beer-hungry fools, and women who bathe in peanuts to make men swoon. But I still prefer more compelling entertainment: the complex conversational sell, the pitcher who can induce the double play, the brand story infused with character and nuance, VORP over HRs.

So let’s enjoy Josh Hamilton’s epic performance (he really was mashing the ball!). But let’s also remember that his team, the Texas Rangers, still can’t pitch a lick and haven’t made the playoffs in nearly a decade.

For more interesting baseball content, check out this DIY segment from My Home 2.0. It features Ryan Howard of the Phillies (a monumental slugger) and a bat we hacked to measure his swing speed.

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This truck was spotted making deliveries on White Street. I’m not accusing anyone at Campfire of being a vampire just yet, but I honestly can’t recall the last time I saw Brian Cain out in the daytime…

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Check out Twittering Teddy on MyHome2.0 - Brought to you by Verizon’s FiOS

How’s it done? Teddy uses Twitter and a Ustream feed to provide live video of Teddy speaking your tweets. Created by our own Tech Gurus, Lloyd Emelle and Alison Lewis. Build your own in a few quick steps, see the DIY

Technorati Tags: Campfire, FiOS, marketing, MyHome2.0, Social Media, Twitter, Verizon, Viral Marketing

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Rob Norman wrote a fascinating piece on his On Demand blog, taking a stab at how we’ll create, consume, and measure media in the future. From where we sit, his “Work of Fiction” doesn’t seem all that fictional at all.

We know that content is migrating to smaller and smaller screens, that distribution channels are expanding faster than the content creators’ ability to fill them, and that looking at small screens the same way we look at TV and movie screens is a fatal flaw.

As we’re hearing from our friends on the brand side and on the entertainment side, everyone is gearing up to deliver entertainment to mobile phones, computer screens, digital readers, etc. in the ways that people are consuming content today. The real issue–and what makes Rob’s post so prescient–is predicting how we’ll leverage all these platforms to tell brand and entertainment stories tomorrow.

Wayne Gretzky’s cliche’d aphorism applies here: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Yoda couldn’t have said it any better.

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